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When Abigaille Takes the Crown Parma
Teatro Regio
10/03/2026 - & October 11, 18*, 24, 2026
Giuseppe Verdi: Nabucco
Ariunbaatar Ganbaatar (Nabucco), Andrés Moreno García (Ismaele), Michele Pertusi (Zaccaria), Lidia Fridman (Abigaille), Laura Verrechia (Fenena), Adriano Gramigni (Gran Sacerdote di Belo), Simone Fenotti (Abdallo), Maria Cristina Bellantuono (Anna)
Coro del Teatro Regio di Parma, Martino Faggiani (Chorus Master), Orchestra del Teatro comunale di Bologna, Francesco Lanzillotta (Conductor)
Pier Luigi Pizzi (Stage Director, Sets & Costumes), Massimo Pizzi Gasparon Contarimi (Assistant Director & Lighting), Marco Berriel (Stage movement)
(© Roberto Ricci/Festival Verdi)
Few operas have acquired a historical reputation as disproportionate to their dramatic complexity as Nabucco. Verdi’s third opera, premiered at La Scala in 1842, was his first resounding success and the work that established him as a major force in Italian musical theatre. Yet its importance extends beyond the familiar legend of a composer rescued from despair by the unexpected success of “Va, pensiero.” At a time when bel canto conventions still governed much of Italian opera, Verdi and his librettist, Temistocle Solera, subordinated the customary amorous intrigue to a conflict involving political domination, religious conviction and the suffering of an entire people.
The result was an opera in which the chorus acquired a dramatic agency rarely granted to it in the preceding generation. Its collective voice did not merely comment upon the fortunes of the protagonists: it embodied the historical consciousness of a people deprived of its homeland. This conception would recur in Verdi’s subsequent collaborations with Solera, notably Giovanna d’Arco (1845) and Attila (1846), in which individual destinies likewise unfolded against a larger national or communal catastrophe.
At the Teatro Regio di Parma, Pier Luigi Pizzi approached Nabucco by stripping away much of the visual grandiloquence with which the opera is frequently encumbered. The resulting production was not invariably successful in translating visual elegance into dramatic vitality. Nevertheless, its restraint offered a useful corrective to the assumption that an opera concerned with conquest, religious conflict and mass suffering must necessarily be staged as an exercise in monumental excess. Francesco Lanzillotta’s musical direction and, above all, Lidia Fridman’s extraordinary Abigaille gave the performance its principal distinction.
Pizzi, who was responsible for the direction, sets and costumes, constructed a deliberately austere theatrical environment. The stage was dominated by a monumental staircase and a dark, geometrically ordered architectural structure, while a restricted palette of black, white and red established an immediate visual distinction between the Hebrews and their Assyrian conquerors. The latter’s red costumes suggested violence and bloodshed, while the Hebrews’ more restrained attire emphasised their collective identity.
This was a welcome departure from the colossal reconstructions of ancient Babylon that have so often burdened Nabucco. Pizzi understood that the opera’s dramatic force resides less in the external magnificence of its setting than in the collision of competing claims to authority. His scenery was correspondingly economical, relying on a handful of significant objects rather than a succession of spectacular tableaux.
The enormous seven-branched menorah was particularly effective. When the Assyrians toppled it, the gesture acquired a symbolic force that extended beyond the destruction of a theatrical prop: it represented the humiliation of a people whose religious and cultural identity had been violated by military conquest. The image was more eloquent than the conventional business of presenting the defeated Hebrews as a mass of demonstratively grieving victims.
A golden statue, erected in honour of Nabucco as a deity, supplied the complementary image of the ruler’s hubris. His attempt to transcend the limits of earthly sovereignty was not simply another manifestation of authoritarian arrogance. In the opera’s theological framework, it constituted an offence against an authority greater than his own. Pizzi’s staging allowed this distinction to remain visible without laboriously explaining it.
The handling of Nabucco’s blasphemy and subsequent punishment was especially judicious. Productions of Nabucco have often attempted to render the king’s encounter with divine retribution through an accumulation of thunderous effects, elaborate machinery and visual tumult, with results that can diminish rather than magnify the moment. Here, Nabucco simply fell to the ground. The absence of theatrical bombast made his sudden helplessness all the more striking: a man who had presumed to command the heavens was reduced to a body incapable of sustaining itself.
His altered costume marked the ensuing transformation, the change of colour suggesting penance and the abandonment of his former pretensions. The significance lay not in the ingenuity of the costume change itself but in the underlying idea that the king’s humiliation must be understood as more than a political reversal. Nabucco’s authority had been exposed as finite, and his eventual recovery would depend upon recognising a spiritual power that he could neither command nor appropriate.
Such economy was entirely consonant with Pizzi’s aesthetic. In a recent interview, the director described his evolution towards a theatre less dependent upon spectacle and more concerned with moral and expressive substance. His Parma production exemplified that philosophy. It was not, however, uniformly persuasive. Formal austerity can become a virtue in itself, and the production occasionally seemed more concerned with maintaining its visual equilibrium than with probing the emotional turbulence of the drama. The geometrical precision of the stage pictures sometimes left the relationships between the characters insufficiently animated.
Yet Pizzi’s restraint also made it possible to concentrate on the opera’s central figures without distraction. Abigaille’s ascent to power, Fenena’s precarious position, Zaccaria’s religious authority and Nabucco’s gradual disintegration emerged within a visual framework that, at its best, clarified rather than competed with the music.
If Pizzi’s production occasionally appeared too controlled, Lidia Fridman supplied the theatrical electricity it needed. Her Abigaille was the evening’s undisputed centre of gravity, a performance of formidable vocal assurance and commanding physical presence that confirmed the singer’s particular affinity for Verdi’s most demanding dramatic heroines.
Having impressed as Lady Macbeth in Parma and more recently as Lina in Stiffelio in Piacenza, Fridman confronted a role whose notorious difficulties have humbled singers of considerable distinction. Abigaille requires a synthesis of attributes that rarely coexist so naturally in a single voice: incisive coloratura, formidable upper-register extension, secure low notes, sustained dramatic intensity and the capacity to relinquish vocal opulence in favour of lyrical introspection. Her music alternates between the imperious declamation of a woman determined to seize power and the exposed lyricism of someone whose ambitions conceal profound emotional injuries.
The role has long been associated with the vocal hazards of early Verdi. Giuseppina Strepponi, the composer’s future companion, sang Abigaille in the opera’s early history, and the part has frequently been invoked in accounts of the physical demands placed upon her voice. The later career of Elena Suliotis, whose spectacular Abigaille in the 1960s brought her considerable renown before her career faltered, has likewise become part of the role’s cautionary mythology. Such comparisons should not be pressed into a simplistic causal explanation of either singer’s subsequent vocal history. They nevertheless illustrate the exceptional demands of a part that requires more than sheer volume or a handful of impressive high notes.
Fridman’s achievement was to make these demands appear integral to the character rather than a succession of vocal obstacles to be overcome. Her distinctive timbre, agility, secure upper register and command of legato gave her the technical means to negotiate the score’s extremes, while her imposing stage presence established Abigaille as a figure of dangerous authority. In her martial costume, with its almost Amazonian silhouette, she conveyed a striking combination of seductiveness and imperiousness. She seemed capable of commanding the battlefield as readily as the court, yet her physical assurance never entirely concealed the instability beneath her ambition.
The Act III confrontation with Nabucco was among the evening’s most compelling episodes. Fridman presented Abigaille as a woman who had learnt to turn humiliation into aggression and vulnerability into an instrument of domination. Her manipulation of her adoptive father, culminating in the decree condemning the Hebrews, was chilling in its calculated ruthlessness. The scene’s dramatic force arose not merely from the brilliance of the vocal writing but from the impression that Abigaille’s authority depended upon her ability to destroy whatever threatened it.
Yet it was in “Anch’io dischiuso un giorno” that Fridman revealed the full measure of her artistry. The aria is often treated primarily as a test of vocal stamina and virtuosity, but its dramatic significance lies in the sudden disclosure of a consciousness at odds with the character’s outward ferocity. Abigaille recalls a lost innocence and a capacity for love that ambition, rejection and resentment have progressively obscured. The revelation that she is the daughter of slaves rather than Nabucco’s legitimate offspring compounds her sense of exclusion: she is denied not only the love she desires but the hereditary right to the power she seeks.
Fridman allowed this buried humanity to emerge through carefully controlled phrasing, supple legato and subtle modifications of tone. Her softer singing was not an interruption in the portrayal of a ruthless woman but its necessary complement. For a brief moment, Abigaille ceased to be an almost superhuman embodiment of vengeance and became a wounded individual whose cruelty was inseparable from her inability to reconcile herself with her own humiliation. The distinction was crucial. A merely spectacular Abigaille can dominate a performance; a psychologically persuasive one can transform the opera.
Fridman’s final scene was similarly revealing. In “Su me... morente, esanime,” the singer relinquished some of the vocal opulence that had characterised her earlier appearances, allowing expressive concentration to take precedence over sheer force. Her portrayal traced a credible progression from unassailable self-assertion to the recognition of defeat. The final collapse acquired its poignancy because the audience had been permitted to glimpse the vulnerable woman whom the would‑be tyrant had sought to suppress.
There were, to be sure, occasional unevennesses of vocal colour, particularly in the lower register, and some dramatic phrases favoured force over refinement. These reservations are worth acknowledging precisely because Fridman’s performance merited more than unqualified admiration for its sheer amplitude. Her accomplishment resided in the relationship between vocal means and dramatic ends: the technical extremes became expressive necessities rather than ends in themselves.
Having encountered many distinguished interpreters of Abigaille, from Mara Zampieri to Saioa Hernández, I found Fridman’s assumption of the role remarkable above all for the completeness of her identification with the character. She did not merely sing Abigaille’s music impressively; she inhabited the contradictions that make the part so difficult to realise. Her performance made the character’s ferocity, ambition, wounded pride and eventual downfall parts of a single psychological trajectory. In a production whose emotional temperature occasionally remained below that of the score, Fridman supplied the human drama that made the evening memorable.
Admired last season as a magnificent Giacomo in Giovanna d’Arco in Parma, Ariunbaatar Ganbaatar offered a substantial and fundamentally noble interpretation of the title role. His resonant baritone, ample vocal resources and dignified phrasing established him as a singer well suited to Verdi’s repertory. He was particularly effective in the more introspective passages, where the character’s public authority gave way to private anguish.
“Dio di Giuda!” was movingly delivered, while “Deh, perdona ad un padre che delira” revealed an affecting tenderness. In these moments, Ganbaatar suggested the father who had discovered that neither political power nor paternal authority could protect those he loved. His vocal resources were never in doubt, and his interpretation confirmed his promise as a Verdi baritone.
Nevertheless, the dramatic transformation was not always as persuasive as it might have been. Nabucco’s initial arrogance must be sufficiently imposing for his subsequent humiliation to register as a genuine reversal. Ganbaatar could have projected greater menace and regality in the opening acts, making the transition from conqueror to penitent more sharply defined. His portrayal was vocally convincing, but the psychological exploration of this complex trajectory remained somewhat tentative.
The distinction matters because Nabucco’s downfall is not simply the punishment of a tyrant. His claim to divinity exposes the ultimate limits of political sovereignty. The man who believes himself capable of transcending all constraints must confront his own helplessness, and his recovery depends upon an acknowledgement of authority beyond himself. The role therefore demands both monumental presence and the ability to strip that presence away.
Michele Pertusi, as Zaccaria, supplied the production with an admirable counterweight. His veteran bass retained its velvety beauty, while his command of legato, mezza voce and finely controlled phrasing lent the Hebrew high priest an authority grounded in spiritual conviction rather than mere vocal weight. “Tu sul labbro de’ veggenti” was distinguished by its nobility and refinement, and his prophetic pronouncements possessed gravity without becoming ponderous.
Pertusi was especially moving when Zaccaria’s religious authority could not shield him from personal suffering. The high priest’s faith did not make him invulnerable; rather, it enabled him to endure his powerlessness. His contribution was all the more valuable for resisting the temptation to portray the character as an unyielding monument of righteousness. Here was a man whose authority rested upon conviction, not force.
Laura Verrecchia brought a warm, substantial mezzo-soprano to Fenena. Her exchanges with Abigaille were among her most effective moments, although a lighter vocal profile might have provided a more telling contrast with Fridman’s formidable dramatic soprano and better conveyed the character’s vulnerability. Fenena’s importance lies partly in the fact that she represents a form of moral courage fundamentally different from Abigaille’s appetite for domination: her convictions do not require the exercise of power over others.
Andrés Moreno García’s Ismaele was less successful dramatically. The role is comparatively modest in vocal terms, but it requires a charismatic presence capable of sustaining the conflict between private affection and collective catastrophe. His interactions with Fenena and Abigaille remained somewhat distant, leaving the love triangle less convincing than it might have been. Adriano Gramigni supplied an appropriately stern Grand Priest of Belo, while Simone Fenotti made a favourable impression as Abdallo. Maria Cristina Bellantuono completed the supporting cast as Anna.
Francesco Lanzillotta approached the score with intelligence and proportion, balancing martial vigour with lyrical expansiveness and introspection. The Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna played cohesively, while the conductor’s sensitive handling of “Anch’io dischiuso un giorno” supported the aria’s transition from outward authority to inward vulnerability.
Prepared by Martino Faggiani, the Coro del Teatro Regio di Parma was outstanding. “Va, pensiero” unfolded with sonorous restraint and textual clarity, its concluding diminuendo delicately judged. The final prayer, “Immenso Jehovah,” was equally compelling, perhaps even more affecting. Marco Berriel’s stage movement and Pizzi’s visual distinction between Hebrews and Assyrians further reinforced the chorus’s role as a dramatic protagonist, embodying the suffering of a dispossessed people.
Pizzi’s austere staging offered a welcome alternative to the monumental excesses often associated with Nabucco, although its formal elegance did not invariably translate into emotional engagement. Pertusi supplied the requisite spiritual authority, while Ganbaatar’s noble portrayal of the king remained somewhat tentative.
Above all, Lidia Fridman transformed the evening with an Abigaille whose formidable vocal resources were matched by flashes of genuine psychological insight. By revealing the wounded woman beneath the would‑be tyrant, she transcended the familiar stereotype of the murderous, high-note-emitting villain. Her performance embodied the opera’s central tension between the will to dominate and the recognition of human limits, making her the production’s most persuasive achievement.
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